Kulturalität und Translokalität. Zur Frage nach einem translokalen Nachrichtenstil in Europa am Beispiel europäischer und amerikanischer Fernsehnachrichten

Cultural characteristics of texts are a central issue in contrastive textology and in the debate about Americanization or globalization of TV news. Nevertheless, the meaning(s) of the term "culture" often remains unclear. In this article I will discuss the concept of "culturality of text types" and the question of national characteristics of text types in a first part (chapter 1). I will further explicate the focus on the stylistic form of texts that comes along with this concept (2), afterwards I will briefly discuss the relationship between language, culture and nation (3). In a first step I will take a look at the common conceptualization of "culture" in the works of contrastive textology. In this context, results of a diachronic comparison of the Swiss "Tagesschau" and the American "CBS Evening News" are presented (3.1), then I compare the coverage of six European public TV stations and three American network news shows about an air crash in Brazil (3.2). I will argue that the concept of "journalistic cultures" of single TV news shows is the most promising to understand and explain the differences found. Further explanations focusing on single aspects (like nation, language or media system) are not sufficient and neglect that TV news shows are cultural artifacts (3.3). In addition, the analysis suggests that there is a translocal TV news style of public TV stations in (central and north) Europe; there seems to be regional facets next to local and global ones and the according regional cultures are translocal and regionally not homogeneous (4). Summing up, I will subsume the arguments for the assumption of a translocal journalistic culture as a key site for the style of TV news texts (5).